Anne Lamott Quotes

"About novel Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott.

Q: What does the title "Imperfect Birds" mean?

It's a line from a poem by Rumi. The line is "Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds", and it's really about how these kind of scraggly, raggedy nests that are our lives are the sanctuary for other people to step into, and that if you want to see the divine, you really step into the absolute ordinary. When you're at your absolutely most lost and dejected ... where do you go? You go to the nests left by other imperfect birds, you find other people who've gone through it. You find the few people you can talk to about it.

from Writer's Digest May/June 2010"

"I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail.
Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.

Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.

By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you to soften, can wake you up.

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.

You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved — which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.

My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate, like having Janis Joplin with a bad hangover and PMS come to stay with you.

butterflies were wind energy made visible.

Life is not a submarine.

The truth is that your spirits don't rise until you get way down.